I’ve started watching this great fantasy series from the mid-90s and early 00s – it’s called Friends. It follows a group of humanoid characters who treat childbirth as a social occasion, wear full makeup postpartum and never look after their babies. The fantasy element is very clever – so subtle in fact that it is only now, watching it decades later, as a parent myself, that I even noticed it.
Perhaps back in the 90s the otherworldly nature of Phoebe Buffay waiting to give birth to triplets in a room chock-full of her wise-cracking friends, despite it being a high-risk pregnancy, was understood. Maybe the way that Ross Geller’s baby Ben is delivered under a sheet, by an obstetrician apparently working blind, was a well-known speculative fiction trope back then. Possibly when it originally aired, parents were simply amazed by the special effects involved when Rachel Green was shown sitting in a coffee shop gossiping about her love life, three weeks after giving birth, in full makeup and blow-dry, high heels, a pair of size 10 jeans – and entirely without her baby. Whatever was going on, no one at the time seemed fazed by this uncanny valley where babies breastfeed just once in their life, never get ill and are put behind glass in hospital nurseries to be glanced at by visiting relatives who then have sex in cupboards.
Luckily, television depictions of birth and parenting have come a long way since I was a child. And I was paying attention, even then. For instance, I remember the scene from Cold Feet in which Karen stormed into her husband David’s office demanding that he hire her a nanny (nannies are a big feature of these shows, you will notice). What I didn’t remember, and only spotted on a recent rewatch, is that in a preceding scene Karen is shown tearing her hair out at the kitchen table, while trying to feed porridge to her toddler. Except the toddler has a dummy in his mouth, rendering him entirely unable to eat any porridge even if he wanted to.
This sort of continuity error might seem small-scale to some of you, but it’s the sort of glaring misunderstanding of early parent life that makes me wonder if anyone on that writing, directing and production team was regularly feeding their own child.
In recent years, the number of television shows showing something a little closer to what I recognise as pregnancy, birth and early child-wrangling have exploded: Motherland, The Letdown, Trying, Catastrophe, Better Things and Breeders have all made some effort to involve a little domestic labour in their plotlines. Some of them let the babies actually cry and breastfeed. Occasionally the parents look tired and can’t make social arrangements. Sometimes, the children in these shows even have lines.
I have no doubt that this is, in part at least, because there are more women writing, directing and producing television today. And before you say it, yes, I know Marta Kauffman created Friends and I also know that she has three children. But as I’ve already pointed out, Friends is a fantasy series. It’s magical realism. Kauffman knows that, I know that and I’m sure Lisa Kudrow, who got pregnant during season four, knows that too.
I’m not so oblivious to the needs of television drama and comedy to think that you can make a 20-minute episode showing a woman sitting in a dark room at 3am trying to guide a nipple into her baby’s ear, in a delirium of exhaustion while wondering idly if she’s got threadworms again. But as books such as Becky Barnicoat’s new graphic novel Cry When the Baby Cries have shown, the comedy and drama involved in pregnancy and parenthood are right there, in heart-rending, breathtaking detail, if we just allow people to show them.
Maybe books have always done it better. About 40 years after they were published, the classic Jill Murphy children’s books Five Minutes’ Peace, Peace at Last and Whatever Next! still speak more directly to the experience of being a parent than many film and television depictions we’ve had since.
Mrs Large from Five Minutes’ Peace may be a bipedal marmalade-eating elephant living in the suburbs. But she’s still a more realistic parent than Rachel Green.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
